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GIAMBATTISTA   BODONI 
OF  PARMA 


Ihis  biographical  sketch  of  the  Hfe  of  the 
ItaUan  printer,  Giambattista  Bodoni,  was 
delivered  by  Thomas  iMaitland  Cleland  of 
New  York,  at  a  meeting  of  The  Society 
of  Printers  in  Boston,  April   23,  iQiS. 

Two  hundred  and  fifty  copies  have  been 
printed  by  The  University  Press,  Cam- 
bridge, Massachusetts,  for  The  Society  of 
Printers,  of  which  this  is 


No 


..  I'll 


Mo.>LMli.M     lO   HoDUM,    KIlKCTEl)   AT    SaLIZZO,    Oc  r .    30,     187  a 


GIAMBATTISTA  BODONI 
OF  PARMA 

T.  M.  GLELAND 


BOSTON 
THE  SOCIETY  OF  PRINTERS 

M  C  M  X  V  I 


Copyright,   1016, 
3t  T.   M.   Cleland 


GIAMBATTISTA 

BODONI 

OF  PARMA 


Mr.  President  and  Members  of  The  Society 
of  Printers : 

In  selecting,  as  the  subject  of  your  meeting 
tonight,  Bodoni,  the  printer  of  Parma,  on 
this  centennial  anniversary  of  his  death,  you 
have  done  a  very  wise  and  just  thing.  For 
though  he  may  have  been  over-praised  and 
honoured  in  his  own  day,  he  has  certainly 
received  rather  more  than  a  fair  share  of 
neglect  in  ours.  While  I  am  very  sensible 
of  the  honour,  I  am  not  so  sure  of  the  wis- 
dom of  your  having  asked  me  to  talk  to  you 


357086 


on  this  subject,  and  as  you  have  made  this 
bed,  you  may  be  compelled  to  fall  asleep  in 
it  before  the  evening  is  over;  but  we  have, 
fortunately,  what  appears  to  be  a  very  repre- 
sentative collection  of  specimens  of  Bodoni's 
work  here  tonight  for  inspection  and  study. 
These  shall  be  the  real  speakers  of  the  even- 
ing, and  from  them  I  hope  you  will  gather 
much  interest  and  even  inspiration.  My  part 
shall  be  no  more  than  to  introduce  them  to 
you  —  a  sufficiently  difficult  one  within  such 
a  limited  time.  To  do  this  we  must  know 
something  of  the  history  of  the  printer  him- 
self; we  must  analyze,  as  far  as  we  are  able, 
the  elements  of  his  style,  consider  the  sources 
from  which  it  grew,  and  note  wherein  it  is 
distinctive  or  original. 

The  principal  source  of  biographical  data 
which  we  have  relative  to  Bodoni  is  the 
"Life"  written  by  his  friend,  Joseph  De 
Lama,  and  published  at  Parma  in  1816  — 
a  work  rich  in  the  banalities  and  bombast 
common  to  the  biographies  of  that  epoch, 
and  which  does  not,  I  regret  to  say.  present 
quite  the  vivid  impression  of  its  hero  which 


we  should  like  to  have.  Another  book,  com- 
piled at  an  earlier  date  and  entitled  "Anec- 
dotes to  Serve  for  a  Life  of  G.  B.  Bodoni," 
is  certainly  more  interesting  because  of  its 
more  personal  note;  but  since  it  is  not  so 
much  the  history  as  the  work  of  Bodoni  as 
a  printer  which  is  important  to  us  as  printers, 
1  shall  offer  you  only  the  briefest  and  barest 
outline  of  his  early  life,  with  a  view  to  arriving 
the  sooner  at  a  more  careful  consideration  of 
his  types  and  the  books  and  other  things  he 
printed  from  them  at  the  Royal  Press  of  Parma . 

Giambattista  Bodoni  was  born  at  Saluzzo, 
in  the  Province  of  Piedmont,  on  the  i6th  of 
February,  17/io.  His  father  was  a  printer 
before  him,  and  we  are  told  by  his  biographer 
that  he  applied  himself  diligently  in  his  early 
youth  to  the  learning  of  that  trade,  and  that 
when  he  was  but  twelve  years  of  age  he 
showed  a  decided  artistic  instinct  by  devising 
some  nocturnal  illuminations  on  the  front 
of  his  father's  house,  during  a  local  festival, 
which  excited  the  wonder  and  admiration  of 
the  inhabitants  of  Saluzzo. 

It  is  of  more  interest  to  us,  however,  to 


know  that  when  still  quite  a  boy  he  cut  a 
number  of  wood  blocks  with  such  success 
that  the  prints  from  them  obtained  some  sale 
in  Turin.  The  approbation  which  these  early 
attempts  received  appears  to  have  aroused  in 
young  Bodoni  a  lively  ambition  to  go  to  Rome 
and  there  perfect  himself  in  this  art.  He  had 
a  great  curiosity,  we  are  told,  to  see  the  famous 
press  of  the  Propaganda  Fides,  the  missionary 
institution  of  the  Roman  Church  w  Inch  issues 
ecclesiastical  works  in  all  languages  for  dis- 
tribution all  over  the  world. 

He  was  eighteen  years  of  age  when  he  set 
out  on  this  journey,  with  one  of  his  fellow 
townsmen  for  companion,  and  when  he  finally 
succeeded  in  visiting  the  press  of  the  Propa- 
ganda his  enthusiasm  and  interest  so  impressed 
the  head  of  that  institution  that  he  immedi- 
ately engaged  Bodoni  as  a  compositor.  During 
his  stay  here  he  took  up  the  study  of  Oriental 
languages  with  such  success  that  he  was  able 
to  redistribute  and  put  into  useful  order  the 
series  of  exotic  characters  which  had  been 
cut  in  Sixtus  Fifth's  time  by  the  I'ronch  typo- 
cutters  Garamond  and  Le  Be,  and  which  had 


become  hopelessly  pied,  and  had  been  for  a 
long  time  useless.  He  had  to  clean  the  rust 
from  the  punches  and  matrices  and  put  them 
in  good  order  for  casting,  and  it  is  painful 
for  the  less  scholarly  among  us  to  dwell  upon 
a  task  like  this,  and  difficult  to  conceive  of 
the  interest  and  enthusiasm  which  alone  could 
have  supported  him  in  it.  And  yet  this  in- 
terest in  these  strange  outlandish  characters 
never  seems  to  have  deserted  him  from  that 
time  on,  as  we  shall  see  later,  by  examining 
his  "Manuale,"  or  specimen  book  of  types. 
It  is  apparently  through  his  labours  with  these 
matrices  and  punches  that  he  was  inspired 
to  undertake  the  cutting  of  type  punches  on 
his  own  account. 

His  first  attempts  at  this  were  decided 
failures,  but  he  kept  at  it  until  he  succeeded 
in  getting  a  fairly  good  ornament,  and  finally 
a  series  of  capital  letters,  which  were  admired 
by  his  associates  at  Rome. 

He  made  an  important  friend  at  this  time 
—  the  Father  Maria  Paciaudi,  then  Librarian 
to  Cardinal  Spinelli,  the  head  of  the  Propa- 
ganda; and  it  was  this  same  priest  who  after- 


wara  Decame  ijioranan  loine  uuKe  rcruinana 
I  of  Parma  on  his  succession  to  that  state  in 
1765.  The  Duke  of  Parma,  inspired  by  the 
counsels  of  his  minister,  Du  Tillot,  established 
an  Academy  of  Fine  Arts,  founded  the  remark- 
able library  which  still  exists  in  that  city,  and 
was  ambitious  to  have  a  royal  press  like  those 
at  Paris ,  Madrid ,  Turin ,  and  other  capitols ,  and 
it  was  Father  Paciaudi  who  suggested  Bodon 
as  the  director  of  such  an  establishment. 

Bodoni,  in  the  meantime,  had  decided  or 
a  trip  to  England,  where  he  had  been  tolc 
greater  opportunities  would  be  open  to  hinr 
than  at  Bome.  He  had  stopped  to  visit  hij 
parents  at  Saluzzo,  when  he  was  taken  witl 
a  fever  which  kept  him  there  for  some  time 
It  was  this  fortunate,  if  not  agreeable,  cir- 
cumstance which  put  an  end  to  the  projeclec 
visit  to  England  and  kept  him  in  Italy  at  the 
moment  when  the  Parma  Government  wa; 
seeking  a  director  for  its  press.  The  offei 
reached  him  at  Saluzzo,  and  on  the  2/|th  o 
February,  1 768,  we  find  him  arrived  at  Parmj 
and  preparing  to  build  presses  and  collect  th( 
various  materials   whicli  were   to  form   th( 


i  already  existed  in  the  Ducal  Palace  of 
rma,  and  a  document  has  been  found  which 
s  printed  in  the  seventeenth  century,  en- 
ed  "A  Note  on  the  Printing  Types  in  the 
ess  of  the  Duke  of  Parma,"  etc.  But  this 
ist  have  been  a  poor  affair  and  fallen  into 
luse,  for  I  can  find  no  mention  of  Bodoni's 
ving  made  use  of  anything  he  found  there. 
Bodoni  was  now  twenty-eight  years  of  age, 
d  it  is  at  this  point  that  his  career  as  a 
inter  begins;  and  the  story  of  his  life  is  in 
dity  the  story  of  his  work.  Thus,  before 
rsuing  any  further  his  biography,  it  would 
well  to  consider  the  nature  of  this  work 
d  some  of  the  influences  and  conditions 
t  of  which  it  developed. 
Like  most  successful  men  he  arrived  upon 
I  scene  at  a  very  happy  moment,  when  the 
;  of  printing  was  in  as  low  a  state  of  decline 
it  had  ever  been.  The  lamp  of  the  great 
naissance  was  spluttering  dismally,  and  the 
lendid  mastery  which  we  are  familiar  with 
the  works  of  the  great  printers  of  the  fif- 
snth  and  sixteenth  centuries  began  to  fade 


i3 


in  the  seventeenth,  and  by  the  eighteenth 
century  had  almost  ceased  to  exist.  It  is  quite 
true  that  much  of  the  best  work  of  the  eight- 
eenth century  continued  to  show  some  taste 
and  style  in  composition;  but  this  was  little 
more  than  a  protraction  of  the  good  traditions 
which  died  hard  in  those  days.  At  any  rate, 
interest  in  the  beauty  and  workmanship  of 
typography  and  presswork  for  its  own  sake 
was  very  dead.  Books  were  thought  to  be 
beautiful  because  of  their  engraved  illus- 
trations and  ornament,  and  typography  was 
regarded  as  a  mere  utilitarian  adjunct,  and  in 
some  cases  was  abandoned  altogether,  as  in 
the  editions  of  Horace,  made  by  John  Pine 
in  London  in  1787,  in  which  all  the  text  was 
engraved  on  copper  with  the  plates,  and  which 
was  considered  the  apotheosis  of  fine  book- 
making  at  that  time.  But  if  typography 
and  types  became  poor  and  clumsy,  press- 
work  had  grown  slovenly  beyond  belief,  and 
we  find  some  of  those  books  in  which  the 
exquisitely  designed  and  engraved  plates  of 
the  most  celebrated  of  the  French  draughts- 
men and  engravers  were  lavished  with  the 


loosest  prodigality  so  badly  printed  in  the  text 
as  to  be  almost  illegible. 

To  John  Baskerville,  of  Birmingham,  credit 
is  no  doubt  due  for  the  first  attempt  to  revive 
the  art  of  typography  itself,  and  for  the  first 
publications  in  the  eighteenth  century  which 
threw^  their  entire  dependence  for  recognition 
upon  their  typography  alone,  without  any 
extraneous  adornment.  But  Baskerville  was 
not  altogether  successful,  and  he  certainly  did 
not  get  very  much  encouragement.  His  types 
were  fine  in  certain  respects,  but  they  were  not 
a  sufficiently  radical  improvement  over  those 
which  had  already  existed  to  make  a  very  great 
stir.  A  number  of  others  followed,  like  the 
brothers  Foulis in  Glasgow,  theDidots  in  Paris, 
and  the  Spaniard  Ibarra.  But  it  remained  for 
the  robust  Italian,  with  his  limitless  energy  and 
exalted  ideals,  to  grasp  anew  the  idea  of  the 
organic  beauty  of  printing,  and  to  infuse  into  it 
the  definite  style  and  expression  of  his  epoch. 

Whatever  may  be  our  judgment  now  of 
that  style  and  the  taste  which  produced  it,  it 
is  apparent  that  it  contained  a  more  vital  germ 
than  did  any  of  the  tentatives  of  his  contem- 


porarles,  since  the  best  of  them  came  to  follow 
it,  and  its  influence  is  still  discernible  in  the 
common  current  of  our  printed  matter  today. 
I  say  that  his  style  in  typography  was  a  per- 
fect expression  of  his  own  epoch,  like  any 
art  of  consequence;  but  like  all  artists  of  any 
consequence,  he  was  inspired  by  the  beautiful 
traditions  of  the  past,  and  his  art  was  an 
orderly  development  out  of  these.  He  did  not 
seek  consciously  to  express  his  own  individu- 
ality; happily,  it  was  ample  to  express  itself. 
But  it  is  certain  that  he  introduced  into  the 
forms  of  printing  types  a  decidedly  new  and 
characteristic  style,  which  our  eyes  are  so 
familiar  with  at  the  present  time,  in  all  of 
those  types  which  we  know  as  ' '  modern  face , " 
that  it  is  at  first  a  little  dilTicult  to  see  that  it 
was  so.  And  now,  for  the  reason  that  his 
style,  or  whatever  you  prefer  to  call  it,  was 
so  closely  related  to  the  thought  and  feeling 
of  his  time  and  sprang  out  of  it,  it  seems  to 
me  indispensable  that  we  consider,  at  least 
briefly,  what  was  the  artistic  constitution  of 
this  period  at  the  end  of  the  eighteenth  and 
the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth  century. 


The  art  of  the  middle  of  the  eighteenth 
century,  which  but  a  few  years  ago  was  always 
referred  to  as  wholly  frivolous  (though  I  can't 
think  of  any  more  serious  task  than  to  do  it 
as  beautifully  as  most  of  it  was  done),  had 
certainly  indulged  in  excesses  of  brilliance 
which  left  something  in  the  state  of  the  public 
mind  akin  to  the  purely  private  feeling  of 
having  eaten  too  much  cake,  with  a  consequent 
revival  of  interest  in  humbler  and  simpler 
nourishment.  What  followed  in  the  history 
of  art  was  certainly  dry  and  unpalatable  in 
some  of  its  chief  characteristics. 

The  discovery  of  the  buried  cities  of  Her- 
culaneum  and  Pompeii  had  helped  to  fire 
throughout  Europe  an  immense  enthusiasm 
for  classical  antiquity  and  art.  But  with  all 
the  inspiration  that  was  liberated  by  the  open- 
ing of  these  sepulchres  there  was  mingled 
something  like  a  wave  of  cold,  dead  air,  which 
had  the  effect  of  nearly  asphyxiating  artistic 
progress  altogether .  There  was  Winckelmann , 
who  wrote  volumes  on  classical  sculpture  and 
tried  to  establish  a  system  upon  which  the 
Greeks  had  arrived  at  perfection  of  form ;  and 


17 


there  was  Raphael  Mengs,  the  painter  and 
writer  on  art,  who  had  worked  out  a  theory 
to  combine  the  form  of  Greek  sculpture,  the 
expression  of  Raphael,  the  colour  of  Titian, 
and  the  light  and  shade  of  Correggio.  Mengs 
was  a  pretty  poor  painter  himself,  despite  the 
fact  that  Bodoni,  in  a  letter,  calls  him  the 
"Apelles  of  Our  Time,"  and  says  thatTiepolo 
(one  of  the  best  painters  that  ever  lived) 
wasn't  fit  to  serve  him  at  table. 

All  this  produced  a  return  to  classical  forms , 
if  not  to  classical  feeling.  Everyone  affected 
to  talk  in  high-flown  terms  of  purity  of  form, 
divine  harmony,  etc.,  and  quoted  on  all  oc- 
casions from  the  Greek  and  Latin  authors. 

Bodoni  never  writes  to  a  friend  in  Rome 
and  calls  it  Rome.  He  always  says,  "I  hope 
soon  to  join  you  on  the  banks  of  the  Tiber," 
and  he  always  calls  Madrid  ' '  the  banks  of  the 
Tagus."  Many  of  his  books  bear  the  imprint 
"Grisopoli"  instead  of  Parma,  which  is  some- 
what confusing  until  one  learns  that  this  was 
the  legendary  name  given  to  Parma  during 
the  brief  domination  of  the  Greeks  in  the 
sixth  century.    This  was  the  taste  of  the  time 


which  produced  the  sculptures  of  Canova,  and 
the  paintings  of  the  school  of  David,  which 
have  been  aptly  styled  "tinted  bas-reliefs," 
and  also  the  types  of  Bodoni.  It  was  a  period 
of  rather  pompous  affectations,  which  amuse 
us  a  little  today  and  give  scope  to  that  facile 
faculty  of  negative  criticism  which  is  one  of 
the  best  developed  and  least  effective  accom- 
plishments of  which  our  time  can  boast. 

If  this  pseudo-classical  school  of  art  has  a 
faded  and  artificial  air  in  our  sophisticated 
eyes,  it  is  not  safe  to  assume,  on  the  other 
hand,  that  any  of  those  men  who  attained 
eminence  in  it  were  not  sincere,  and  least  of 
all  that  our  friend  Bodoni  was  not.  One  can- 
not read  the  record  of  his  activities  and  see 
listed  the  great  volume  of  his  productions  in 
the  "  Life"  written  by  De  Lama,  one  cannot 
contemplate  the  almost  superhuman  labour 
of  cutting  all  those  types  in  the  "Manuale," 
or  read  what  he  has  to  say  in  the  preface  of 
that  book,  or  in  his  letters,  on  the  subject 
of  his  work,  and  fail  to  realize  that  he  was 
a  man  profoundly  and  passionately  devoted 
to  his  art. 


19 


We  have  considered,  in  a  very  rough 
fashion,  what  was  the  intellectual  basis  of 
his  peculiar  type  designs  and  style  of  compo- 
sition; but  we  must  remember  that  he  did 
not  start  out  with  this  characteristic  style 
full  blown;  and  though  it  was,  as  I  have 
said,  the  expression  of  his  epoch  and  grew 
out  of  it,  Bodoni,  of  course,  was  no  more 
conscious  of  the  special  flavour  of  that  epoch 
than  we  are  of  ours.  We  must  look  to  the 
practical  basis  of  his  work  as  it  appeared  to 
him  in  order  to  arrive  at  any  understanding 
of  it. 

When  he  established  himself  in  the  Parma 
Press  he  had  to  have  an  outfit  of  types ;  for 
up  to  that  time  his  own  efforts  at  type  cutting 
were  hardly  successful  enough  for  so  impor- 
tant an  undertaking.  After  due  consideration 
of  the  types  of  the  principal  founders  of  the 
time,  he  judged  those  of  the  French  founder, 
Fournier,  to  be  the  best,  and  accordingly  he 
ordered  six  different  sizes  of  Fournier' s  types 
from  Paris.  With  these  he  printed  the  first 
six  items  issued  from  the  Ducal  Press  under 
his   direction.    But   he   was   not   content   to 


rest  upon  the  sufficiently  honourable  title  of 
printer  to  the  Duke  of  Parma,  and  his  genius 
asserts  itself  here  in  his  desire  for  perfection. 
He  must  improve  on  Fournier's  types,  much 
as  he  evidently  admired  them ;  and  very  soon 
after  his  settlement  at  Parma  he  established 
a  foundry  of  his  own  and  took  his  brother 
Joseph  in  to  manage  it.  He  set  to  work  cut- 
ting his  punches,  and  in  1771  he  brought 
out  his  first  specimen  book  of  borders  and 
capitals,  which  was  distributed  gratis,  as  a 
sort  of  advertisement  for  the  press.  There 
are  only  a  few  types  in  this,  but  an  extrava- 
gant profusion  of  ornaments.  It  is  interesting 
to  see  in  this  first  specimen  how  completely 
he  was  under  the  French  influence ;  for  in 
this  book  he  copies  outright  the  elaborately 
framed  title-pages  of  Fournier's  "Manuel," 
constructed  entirely  from  moveable  type  or- 
naments and  borders.  It  is  difficult  to  dis- 
cover the  very  minute  differences  which  exist 
between  these  first  types  of  Bodoni  and  those 
by  which  they  were  inspired.  For  a  con- 
siderable time  after  this  he  continues  to  show 
a  fondness  for  the  baroque  character  of  the 


French  work,  and  uses  ornaments  in  great 
number  and  with  great  ingenuity,  if  not 
always  with  the  best  taste. 

There  is  little  in  this  early  work  which  is 
above  the  average  of  the  time,  and  certainly 
nothing  to  foretell  the  severity  and  elegance 
of  his  full-fledged  style.  He  went  on  relining 
and  improving  on  Fournier's  designs,  which 
were  good  sound  models  in  their  way,  working 
step  by  step  in  his  own  peculiar  direction 
toward  what  amounted  finally  to  a  complete 
innovation  in  the  forms  of  Roman  characters, 
and  brought  about  a  radical  change  in  the 
style  and  arrangement  of  printed  matter 
generally. 

Now  by  way  of  explanation  of  just  what 
that  innovation  was  and  what  w  ere  the  pecul- 
iarities of  his  design,  we  cannot  do  better 
than  quote  from  the  preface  of  his  ' '  Manuale  " 
where  he  states  some  of  his  theories  on  the 
subject.  He  says :  "  It  is  proper  here  to  ofi'er 
the  four  diff'erent  heads  under  which  it  seems 
to  me  are  derived  the  beauties  of  type,  and 
the  first  of  these  is  regularity  —  conformity 
without    ambiguity,   variety   without    disso- 


nance,  and  equality  and  symmetry  without 
confusion.  A  second  and  not  minor  value  is 
to  be  gained  from  sharpness  of  definition, 
neatness,  and  finish.  From  the  perfection  of 
the  punches  in  the  beginning  comes  the  polish 
of  the  well-cast  letter  which  should  shine  like 
a  mirror  on  its  face."  His  next  point  is  that 
of  taste,  and  here  he  speaks  of  ' '  The  beautiful 
contrast  as  between  light  and  shade  which 
comes  naturally  from  any  writing  done  with 
a  well-cut  pen  held  properly  in  the  hand." 
It  must  be  admitted  that  most  of  this  state- 
ment is  fuller  of  redundancy  than  of  meaning; 
but  this  latter  sentence  about  ' '  light  and 
shade  "  and  the  natural  effect  of  writing  with 
a  pen  is  illuminating  in  the  highest  degree 
and.  explains  more  clearly  than  anything  else 
he  has  to  say  the  aim  and  tendency  of  his 
type  design.  In  order  to  achieve  this  "light 
and  shade"  he  made  his  thin  strokes  thinner 
and  the  thick  ones  thicker  than  they  had  ever 
been  made  in  Roman  types  before,  and  he 
cut  them  with  a  sharpness  and  regularity 
which  had  never  up  to  that  time  been  equalled. 
He  speaks  of  the  natural  effect  of  their  being 


written  with  a  well-cut  pen,  and  I  presume 
you  are  all  more  or  less  familiar  with  the 
kind  of  pen  he  refers  to  here  —  the  quill  or 
reed,  cut  something  in  the  form  of  a  little 
chisel,  its  mechanical  action  rendering  a  broad 
line  when  it  is  drawn  down  or  up  in  the  direc- 
tion of  the  broad  face  of  the  nib,  and  a  thin 
line  when  it  is  drawn  crossways  on  the  thin 
edge.  The  design  of  all  good  types  was,  of 
course,  based  on  this  action  of  the  pen  in 
WTiting,  and  the  very  forms  of  the  letters 
themselves,  as  well  as  the  living  quality  of 
their  design,  have  their  origin  in  it.  It  seems 
hardly  necessary  to  state  this  principle  since, 
with  the  exception  of  our  typefounders,  almost 
everyone  is  familiar  w  ith  it.  But  what  Bodoni 
did  w\is  to  consider  his  designs  as  being  made 
with  a  broader  and  sharper-edged  pen  than 
anyone  had  thoughtofbefore,  or  than,  I  doubt, 
anyone  would  be  able  to  make.  If  we  have 
any  fault  to  find  with  him,  it  is  here,  for  in 
striving  for  neatness  and  sharpness  and  greater 
contrast  he  overstepped  the  mark  a  little  and 
gave  to  his  letters  something  more  of  the  char- 
acter of  copperplate  engraving  than  of  penman- 


ship.  Another  change  which  he  introduced 
into  the  forms  of  his  Roman  letters  was  in 
the  serifs.  In  the  old-style  types,  and  in  the 
classical  Roman  forms  generally,  the  serifs  did 
not  form  a  sharp  angle  with  the  upright  strokes 
of  the  letters,  but  flowed  into  them  on  more 
or  less  of  a  curve.  The  serifs  of  the  lowercase 
letters  you  will  remember,  in  the  earlier  types, 
do  not  form  a  right  angle  with  the  upright 
strokes,  but  rather  an  acute  one.  Bodoni  re- 
duced the  serifs  of  his  capitals  to  single  sharp 
lines  of  the  same  weight  as  the  thin  strokes  of 
the  letters,  and  the  serifs  of  his  lowercase  are 
raised  to  a  nearly,  if  not  quite,  horizontal  posi- 
tion at  right  angles  with  the  upright  strokes. 
This  plays  an  important  part  in  that  sharpness 
and  brilliance  which  he  tells  us  he  sought, 
and  tends  to  produce  an  efiTect  of  rigidity  in 
keeping  with  the  coldly  classical  ideal  by  which 
he  was  governed.  While  his  own  types  were 
never  really  mechanical  and  lifeless,  they  often 
had  sufficient  appearance  of  being  so  to  lend 
encouragement  to  a  tendency  which  ended  in 
the  complete  destruction  of  this  vital  principle 
of  the  pen  and  produced  the  worst  and  most 

-o-<^  25  ^0- 


artiGcial  types  which  have  ever  been  known. 
It  is  the  well-merited  repugnance  for  these 
which  has  brought, unjustly, I  think, disfavour 
upon  Bodoni.  He  should  hardly  be  held  re- 
sponsible for  the  exaggerations  and  miscon- 
ceptions of  his  aims.  The  Didots  in  France 
carried  the  idea  a  step  further,  but  they  printed 
with  such  perfect  taste  and  style  that  one  is 
inclined  to  excuse  them  on  these  grounds.  He 
offers,  farther  on  in  his  preface,  his  system 
of  measurement  for  the  proportions  of  his 
lowercase  letters,  "Divide  the  body  of  the 
type  into  seven  parts,"  he  says,  "and  let  two 
at  the  top  and  two  at  the  bottom  be  for  the 
ascenders  and  descenders  and  the  three  in  the 
middle  for  the  other  letters."  Any  such  at- 
tempt to  regulate  design  by  mathematical  rule 
is  bad,  of  course,  and  Bodoni  himself  admits 
that ' '  these  proportions  should  receive  no  law 
but  from  what  pleases  the  vision."  I  am  not 
sure,  however,  that  such  a  rule  would  not  do 
much  for  type  design ;  it  might  at  least  put 
an  end  to  the  practice  of  typefounders  who 
try  to  crowd  their  faces  on  bodies  too  small 
for  them,    ruthlessly  chopping   off  the   de- 


scenders  of  the  letters  wherever  they  interfere 
with  this  procedure. 

Bodoni's  Italic  letters,  while  thej  have  in 
some  instances  a  good  deal  of  distinction,  are 
generally  less  successful  than  the  Romans,  and 
nearly  always  have  the  weakening  effect  of  too 
much  slant. 

The  equipment  of  type  faces  which  are 
shown  in  the  "Manuale"  as  representing  the 
sum  of  his  achievements  is  bewildering  in  the 
range  of  sizes  and  in  the  variety  of  foreign 
and  exotic  characters.  Arthur  Young,  the  cel- 
ebrated English  economist,  gives  an  account 
in  one  of  the  journals  of  his  "Travels"  of  a 
visit  to  Bodoniin  1789  in  which  he  says  that 
he  had  3o,ooo  matrices  at  that  time.  In  her 
introduction  to  the  ' '  Manuale,"  the  widow  of 
Bodoni  tells  us  that  he  believed  a  thoroughly 
equipped  establishment  should  be  furnished 
with  such  a  gradation  of  characters  that  the 
eye  in  passing  from  one  to  the  other  might 
hardly  be  able  to  perceive  the  difference.  The 
sizes  of  the  Romans  run  from  what  he  calls 
"  Parmigianina,"  which  would  correspond 
about  to  our  3}/2  or  ^  point,  up  to  "  Papale," 


which  would  certainly  require  a  body  of  at 
least  eighty  points  of  our  measurement,  and 
it  is  very  hard  to  distinguish  any  size  from 
that  immediately  preceding  or  following  it. 
Not  only  were  there  all  these  sizes,  but  there 
were  two  kinds  of  faces  of  every  size;  one 
fully  rounded  and  of  strongly  contrasted  lines 
and  one  a  little  condensed  and  of  less  bold 
character,  the  former  being  generally  intended 
for  prose  and  the  latter  for  poetry  where  it 
was  desired  to  avoid  breaking  the  hues. 

"1  have  devised  up  to  the  present,"  he 
says,  "one  hundred  and  forty-two  Roman 
characters,  each  with  Italics  and  capitals,  and 
seventeen  scripts  of  which  thirteen  have  their 
respective  Finanziere,''  which  was  the  name 
given  to  a  more  elaborate  and  florid  form  of 
the  same  letter,  "and  seven  English  com- 
prising two  round  characters,  and  further 
several  Russian,  Greek,  German,  Hebrew, 
and  other  exotics;  also  a  quantity  of  capitals 
for  titles  in  Latin,  Greek,  and  Russian.  All 
of  these  I  have  had  cast  in  matrices  struck 
from  punches  entirely  perfected  with  great 
love  by  my  own  hand."    He  goes  on  to  tell 


us  that  a  single  font,  complete  with  Roman 
and  Italics,  required  some  three  hundred  and 
eighty  punches. 

The  question  of  his  having  cut  all  the 
punches  with  his  own  hand  gave  rise  to  some 
bitter  disputes  in  the  years  when  he  was  at 
the  height  of  his  fame,  and  certainly  the 
number  of  them  seems  a  little  incredible. 
Fournier's  "Treatise  on  Printing,"  published 
in  1758,  says  that  it  took  at  that  time  three 
or  four  hours  to  cut  a  punch,  and  that  not 
more  than  three  or  four  could  be  cut  in  a  day. 
We  know,  however,  that  he  had  assistants 
to  whom  he  taught  punch-cutting  and  type- 
founding,  the  brothers  Amoretti  (who  after- 
ward established  a  foundry  of  their  own), 
and  two  other  men;  and  it  was  claimed  by 
certain  persons  who  wished  to  detract  from 
his  fame  that  he  owed  the  beauty  of  his  types 
to  these  workmen.  We  know,  nevertheless, 
that  the  style  and  manner  is  his  own  invention, 
and  the  probabilities  are  that  the  assistants 
merely  helped  him  in  the  manual  labour  of 
finishing  the  punches  and  matrices.  I  have 
examined  a  specimen  book  of  types  and  bor- 


ders  issued  in  1 8 1 1  from  the  foundry  of  these 
brothers  Amoretti  at  San  Pancrazio,  a  small 
town  near  Parma,  and  while  they  are  me- 
chanically very  well  cut,  there  can  be  little 
question  that  they  lack  the  grace  of  design  of 
the  Bodoni  characters. 

Besides  all  these  types,  Bodoni  cut  an  as- 
tonishing number  of  borders  and  ornaments 
which,  in  the  best  work  of  his  later  years,  he 
seldom  used.  "It  is  not,"  he  says,  "a  wise 
way  in  which  to  lend  pomp  or  dignity  to  a 
book  except,  perhaps,  to  those  books  less 
valued  by  men  of  letters,  and  which  are  printed 
for  the  pleasure  of  persons  of  an  elegance  less 
disdainful."  Yet  in  some  of  the  inscriptions 
and  smaller  work  where  he  made  use  of  the 
ornaments  the  effect  is  altogether  charming. 
It  is  interesting  to  note  how  these  ornaments 
developed  from  the  rococo  French  manner 
into  a  dryer  and  more  classical  form,  much 
as  did  the  types  themselves. 

The  striking  characteristic  of  his  com[)o- 
sltion  is  the  luxurious  and  sometimes  prodigal 
use  which  he  made  of  space.  His  titles  were 
generally  narrow  in  measure  and  were  ar- 


rangements  of  short,  centered  lines  in  various 
sizes,  and  nearly  always  of  capitals.  His  text 
pages  present  a  striking  contrast  to  those  of 
the  masters  of  the  fifteenth  and  sixteenth  cen- 
turies. In  place  of  the  compactness  in  the 
solid  matter  without  leading,  and  the  large 
pages  of  small  type  which  prevailed  in  the 
earlier  books,  Bodoni  endeavoured  to  set  off 
his  brilliant  characters  on  great  fields  of  white 
paper,  and  not  only  to  have  space  in  the 
margins,  but  also  between  the  lines,  showing 
a  decided  predilection  for  setting  large  types 
in  narrow  measures.  This  love  of  space  pro- 
duced a  striking  elegance  of  effect  —  not  the 
elegance  of  the  earlier  printers  certainly,  but 
in  its  own  way  very  splendid.  When  space 
got  in  between  the  lowercase  letters  them- 
selves it  did  more  harm  than  good,  and  some 
of  the  small  sizes  of  the  Roman  types  are  so 
widely  fitted  on  their  bodies  that  the  pages 
printed  with  them  have  a  distressing  appear- 
ance of  having  been  sprayed  with  type.  In 
the  arrangement  of  the  capitals  in  titles  and 
headings,  and  in  the  innumerable  inscriptions 
which  were  issued  from  the  press,  he  showed 


3i 


a  remarkable  nicety  of  taste  and  fine  sense  of 
balance.  And  the  exercise  of  this  faculty  was 
no  mere  matter  of  blind  instinct  or  special 
gift,  but  required  on  Bodoni's  part  the  same 
study  that  it  requires  of  us  today  in  the 
lamentably  few  instances  where  we  find  it 
employed.  There  is  an  amusing  anecdote 
which  bears  out  this  fact  in  one  of  Sten- 
dahl's  journals  of  his  Italian  travels  which  I 
think  is  worth  giving  entire:  "To  do  my 
duty  as  a  traveler,"  he  says,  "I  presented 
myself  at  Monsieur  Bodoni's,  the  celebrated 
printer.  I  was  agreeably  surprised.  This 
Piedmontais  is  not  at  all  ostentatious,  but  in 
love  with  his  art.  After  having  shown  me 
all  his  French  authors  he  demanded  of  me 
which  I  preferred,  the  "Tclemaque"  of  Fene- 
lon,  the  Racine,  or  the  Boilcau.  I  vowed  they 
all  seemed  equally  beautiful.  'Ah,  Monsieur! ' 
cried  Bodoni,  'you  don't  see  the  title  of  the 
Boileau?'  I  looked  at  it  for  a  long  time  and 
was  forced  to  admit  that  I  could  not  see  any- 
thing more  perfect  in  that  title  than  in  the 
others.  'Ah,  Monsieur  1 '  cried  Bodoni  again, 
'Boileau  Despreux  in  one  single  line  of  capitals! 


I  spent  six  months  before  I  could  decide  upon 
exactly  that  type.'  " 

But  if  we  have  any  ground  for  complaint 
against  the  mannerisms  of  his  types  or  can 
find  his  composition  questionable  at  any  point, 
there  is  little  to  be  said  but  praise  for  his 
presswork  at  its  best.  Good  presswork,  it 
must  be  remembered,  was  not  easy  in  those 
days  as  the  presses  were  comparatively  crude 
affairs  and  the  inking  had  to  be  done  with 
the  old  hand  balls  of  leather  stuffed  with  wool 
(rollers  not  coming  into  use  until  about  1820), 
but  the  sharpness  and  brilliance  of  Bodoni's 
best  work  have  never  been  surpassed. 

Its  success  in  a  great  measure  was  due  to 
his  selection  of  papers  for  the  different  sizes 
of  type.  He  preferred  vellum  to  anything 
else,  and  of  his  more  important  editions  a 
few  copies  were  always  made  on  it,  generally 
for  presentation  to  distinguished  patrons. 
When  it  came  to  paper,  he  preferred  what 
was  then  called  vellum  paper,  and  which 
was  made  on  a  woven  wire  screen  invented 
in  England.  The  paper  thus  obtained  re- 
sembled vellum  a  good  deal  more  than  did 


the  papers  made  on  the  laid  screens  which 
were  commonly  in  use  at  that  time.  He  had 
a  way,  too,  of  rolling  his  sheets  after  they 
were  printed  to  smooth  out  the  excess  of  im- 
pression left  by  the  forms,  though  he  himself 
expressly  warns  against  the  abuse  of  this 
process,  which  may  easily  be  made  to  destroy 
entirely  the  impression  which  is  the  life  and 
soul  of  all  really  fine  typographic  printing. 
Another  trick  was  to  paint  in  with  the  brush 
the  spots  on  the  large  letters  which  did  not 
come  off  from  the  impression  entirely  black. 
He  must  have  given  considerable  attention  to 
the  making  of  good  black  ink,  because  pre- 
vious to  his  time  it  had  grown  very  bad,  and 
he  set  a  new  standard  for  his  contemporaries 
to  follow  in  this. 

In  the  form  and  size  of  his  books  he  showed 
a  decided  liking  for  grandeur  and  pomp.  In 
his  preface  he  discourses  somewhat  ingenu- 
ously on  this  subject,  and  advances  the  curious 
theory  that  large  books  are  better  for  the  eyes 
of  far-sighted  people  and  little  ones  for  the 
near-sighted.  He  must  have  thought  Napoleon 
very  far-sighted  indeed,  for  he  printed  a  three- 


volume  edition  of  Homer's  Iliad,  especially 
dedicated  to  him,  in  a  folio  so  large  that  only 
half  a  page  could  be  printed  at  one  time  on 
his  largest  press.  He  presented  the  Emperor 
with  a  copy  on  selected  Bavarian  vellum  which 
miust  certainly  have  been  very  fine. 

Do  Lama's  catalogue,  which  forms  the  sec- 
ond volume  of ' '  The  Life,"  cites  and  describes 
about  three  hundred  and  forty-five  books 
printed  by  him  at  Parma,  not  counting  second 
editions  of  his  works,  and  one  hundred  and 
fifty-five  inscriptions,  pamphlets,  and  other 
matter  of  less  than  eight  pages.  But  in  the 
other  catalogues  of  some  of  the  collections 
of  his  works  appear  numerous  items  which 
are  not  cited  by  De  Lama.  The  matter  is 
further  complicated  by  the  existence  of  other 
volumes  bearing  plainly  enough  the  imprint 
of  the  Royal  Press  at  Parma,  but  not  cited 
in  any  of  the  catalogues  I  have  seen.  They 
are  so  badly  printed  and  in  such  a  different 
manner  from  Bodoni's  that  it  is  difficult  to 
believe  they  are  genuine.  In  i  yyB  he  brought 
out  the  first  of  his  editions  on  a  grand  scale, 
and  one  of  the  most  sumptuous  of  any  of  the 


books  he  ever  printed  —  an  Epithalaniium  in 
several  exotic  languages.  But  its  splendour 
rests  largely  upon  the  number  of  beautiful 
copperplate  ornaments  which  it  contains.  In 
1780  appeared  the  works  of  Raphael  Mengs 
who  had  died  the  year  before,  and  who  was, 
as  we  have  seen,  one  of  the  leading  spirits  in 
the  artistic  thought  of  the  time  and  a  great 
hero  of  Bodoni's.  In  1782  Bodoni  published 
another  series  of  specimens  —  this  time  of 
Russian  characters,  on  forty-four  pages.  It 
contained  inscriptions  in  Latin  and  Russian 
of  congratulations  to  be  presented  to  the 
Russian  prince  and  princess  on  their  passage 
through  Parma.  De  Lama  sa} s :  "  He  offered 
them  respectfully  and  was  delighted  to  see 
the  pleasure  shown  in  their  faces  on  seeing 
the  characters  of  their  native  language  so  fa- 
mously cut  and  printed  in  a  strange  country." 
In  1783  a  Roman  Breviary  was  published 
which  is  printed  throughout  in  red  and  black 
in  four  little  12 mo  volumes.  This  is  chiefly 
interesting  because  of  the  number  of  copies 
which  were  made  and  sold  —  two  thousand 
of  them,  undoubtedly  a  considerable  tax  on 


the  pressroom  of  an  establishment  accustomed 
to  printing  from  five  to  five  hundred  copies. 
In  1784  came  another  book  which  is  remark- 
able for  its  engraved  decorations,  ' '  The  Prose 
and  Verse  in  Honour  of  Livia  Doria  GarafFa," 
in  which  the  typography  and  presswork  are 
up  to  the  mark  of  his  finest  productions.  A 
still  more  sumptuous  reprint  of  this  was  made 
in  1793.  In  1785  he  published  his  letter  to 
the  Marquis  de  Gubieres  in  French  and  Italian, 
written  in  defence  of  his  types  that  had  been 
criticised  in  France.  He  attacks  his  critics 
with  ill-disguised  annoyance,  particularly  over 
the  criticism  of  his  Greek  types,  which  he  here 
says  were  exact  copies  of  those  of  Etienne, 
the  famous  French  scholar  printer  of  the  six- 
teenth century.  When  he  comes  to  the  doubts 
which  had  been  expressed  in  some  quarters 
of  his  having  made  all  the  foreign  types  him- 
self, he  quite  loses  his  temper  and  offers  to 
deposit  all  the  punches  and  matrices  of  the 
types  in  question  in  any  safe  place,  supposing 
that  the  doubting  Thomases  had  no  occasion 
to  come  to  Parma  and  verify  the  fact  on  the 
spot.    It  was  this  publication  which  brought 


him  the  following  letter  from  America,  which, 
I  think,  is  worth  reading: 

Sir  :  I  have  had  the  ver^-  great  pleasure  of  receiving  your 
excellent  "  Essai  dcs  Charact^res  de  L'Imprimerie."  It  is  one  of 
the  most  beautiful  that  art  has  hitherto  produced.  I  should  be 
glad  to  see  a  specimen  of  your  other  fonts  besides  this  Italic  and 
Roman  of  the  letter  to  the  Marquis  de  Gubieres,  and  to  be  in- 
formed of  the  price  of  each  kind.  I  do  not  presume  to  criticise 
your  Italic  capitals  —  they  are  generally  perfect.  I  would  only 
beg  leave  to  say  that  to  me  the  form  of  the  "  t"  in  the  word  lettie 
of  the  title-page  seems  preferable  to  that  of  (he  "t"  in  the  word 
typograp}iie  in  the  next  page.  As  the  dow  u\\  ard  stroke  of  T,  P, 
R,  F,  B,  D,  H,  K,  L,  I,  and  some  others,  which  in  writing  we 
begin  at  the  top,  naturally  swells  as  the  pen  descends,  and  it  is 
only  in  the  "A"  and  the  "M"  and-"N"  that  those  strokes  are 
fine  because  the  pen  begins  them  at  the  bottom.  With  great 
esteem,  I  have  the  honour  to  be,  etc. 

B.  FRANKLIN. 

De  Lama  naively  says  that  Bodoni  was  filled 
with  joy  at  receiving  this  honourahle  letter 
from  the  "  President  of  the  United  States 
of  America"! 

In  1788  appeared  the  first  "Manuale,"  so 
called,  in  36o  pages,  which  contained  a  range 
of  one  hundred  Roman  characters,  each  size 
printed  on  one  side  of  the  paper  and  forming 
a  description  of  a  city.  The  names  of  the 
cities,  which  are  appended  to  each  face  of  type 
in  the  final  "Manuale"  of  1818,  are  intended 
to  identify  it  with  this  earlier  work. 


^^_38_^.c 


Up  to  this  time  the  books  issued  were  prac- 
tically all  undertaken  either  at  the  instigation 
of  the  Duke  or  on  Bodoni's  own  initiative ; 
that  is  to  say,  the  press  did  not  execute 
outside  orders.  But  his  friend  and  patron, 
Gavaliere  d'Azare,  who  was  then  Spanish 
minister  to  Rome,  had  obtained  permission 
to  establish  a  press  at  the  Embassy,  and  he 
wanted  Bodoni  to  come  and  take  charge  of 
it  and  print  some  splendid  editions  of  the 
classics.  Duke  Ferdinand  would  not  listen 
for  a  moment  to  parting  with  his  printer,  but 
suggested  that  the  proposed  classics  could  be 
done  just  as  well  at  Parma.  Bodoni  began 
at  once  on  this  Jiasis,  and  every  week  sent 
his  proofs  to  Rome  to  be  gone  over  by  eminent 
scholars.  In  order  to  facilitate  the  execution 
of  these  orders  from  Rome  he  set  up  presses 
of  his  own  in  the  Ducal  Palace,  and  in  1791 
brought  out  the  first  fruits  of  this  arrange- 
ment in  a  large  folio  edition  of  Horace.  This 
year  begins  a  new  period  in  the  aJBTairs  of  the 
Parma  Press  and  marks  the  transition  from 
his  tentative  and  experimental  stage  to  the 
fully  developed  and  severer  taste  on  which 


his  fame  rests.  He  continued  to  receive  orders 
from  patrons  in  all  parts  of  Europe,  and  even 
from  England,  where  Edwards,  the  London 
bookseller,  commissioned  him  to  print  an 
edition  of  Horace  Walpole's  "Castle  of 
Otranto." 

In  this  year  also,  at  the  age  of  fifty-one, 
he  married  a  Parmesan  lady  to  whom  he  had 
long  been  devoted  and  who  proved  to  be  a 
very  happy  choice.  She  showed  not  only 
great  devotion  throughout  the  remainder  of 
his  life,  but  a  good  deal  of  ability  as  well; 
for  it  was  she  who  finished  the  printing  and 
publication  of  his  "Manuale"  and  carried 
out  the  editions  of  the  French  classics  which 
he  had  planned  and  started  before  his  death. 

Bodoni  had  for  some  time  held  the  title 
of  Printer  to  the  King  of  Spain,  though  I  do 
not  find  that  he  ever  printed  anything  for  him; 
but  notwithstanding,  in  1798  his  Catholic 
Majesty  granted  him  a  pension  of  6,000  reals 
a  year  with  no  obligations  whatsoever.  With 
this  impetus  the  year  1798  became  a  very 
productive  one,  and  among  the  editions  which 
we  can  find  time  to  note  here  was  the  Gray's 


"Elegy"  translated  into  Italian,  and  later 
Graj's  "Complete  Poems"  in  English,  and 
the  edition  of  \irgil  in  two  volumes.  This 
latter  work  brought  down  the  stinging  criti- 
cism of  the  French  printer  and  publisher, 
Firman  Didot,  on  the  score  of  its  inaccuracy, 
and  it  must  have  been  no  pleasant  sensation 
for  poor  old  Bodoni  to  read  Didot' s  letter  to 
a  friend  in  which  he  picks  out  the  errors  in 
this  and  some  of  his  Greek  classics  and  says: 
"  It  is  time,  citizen,  that  men  of  letters  united 
against  negligent  printers  who  think  to  have 
done  all  when  they  have  employed  fine  char- 
acters and  fine  paper,  and  who  regard  the 
correction  of  text  as  a  mere  bagatelle."  But 
he  continues:  "As  a  scholar  I  condemn  him, 
as  a  printer  I  admire  him.  '  Bodoni  tried  to 
explain  these  errors  by  sapng  that  some  im- 
perfect copies  had  been  stolen  from  his  press 
and  sold  and  thus  got  into  France.  We  are 
forced  to  admit,  however,  that  there  must 
have  been  some  foundation  for  this  charge  of 
inaccuracy  since  it  was  frequently  repeated. 
Horace  Walpole  wrote  in  the  postscript  of  one 
of  his  letters  dated  from  Strawberry  Hill, 


December  20,  1790:  "Very  late  at  night. 
I  am  glad  you  did  not  get  a  Parmesan 
Otranto  —  a  copy  is  come  so  full  of  faults  tliat 
it  is  not  fit  to  be  sold  here,"  But  this  Avas 
written  in  1790  and  the  Otranto  was  not 
published  until  1791,  so  it  might  be  fair  to 
assume  that  what  the  elegant  and  gouty  Lord 
Orford  saw  was  an  advance  copy  which  may 
have  been  corrected  afterward. 

Time  will  not  permit  us  to  consider  any 
more  of  his  editions,  except,  perhaps,  to  men- 
tion a  Lord's  Prayer  in  no  fewer  than  one 
hundred  and  fifty-five  languages  done  in  1 806 , 
the  title-page  of  which  is  in  many  respects 
the  finest  flower  of  the  Bodoni  style  and 
seems  to  have  been  admired  by  himself  since 
he  copied  its  general  characteristics  for  the 
title  of  his  own  "Manuale."  The  celebrated 
"Homer"  already  mentioned  came  out  in 
1808,  and  in  his  last  year  the  "Racine"  in 
three  volumes  —  the  first  of  a  series  of  French 
classics  which  he  had  long  had  under  way. 

In  his  later  years  Bodoni  was  very  deaf  and 
suffered  a  good  deal  from  other  physical  in- 
firmities, as  well  as  from  the  assaults  of  critics 


4a 


and  persons  jealous  of  his  fame.  But  to  offset 
these  he  was  more  overwhelmed  with  praise 
and  honours  than  any  printer,  I  believe,  ever 
was  before  or  since.  There  was  hardly  a  per- 
son of  distinction  in  Europe  at  that  time  who 
had  not  visited  his  press.  In  1802  the  city  of 
Parma  had  a  medal  struck  in  his  honour,  and 
there  is  a  book  issued  from  his  press  describing 
this  occasion.  He  was  invited  to  send  proofs 
of  his  work  to  the  Paris  Exposition  of  1806, 
the  jury  of  which  awarded  him  the  gold  medal 
over  his  French  competitors .  In  1 8 1  o ,  Parma 
then  being  a  part  of  the  French  Empire,  Na- 
poleon offered  him  a  pension  of  3, 000  francs, 
and  in  1 8 1  o  also  he  was  given  the  decoration 
of  the  Order  of  the  Two  Sicilies  by  the  King 
of  Naples  in  acknowledgment  of  a  complete 
collection  of  his  works  which  he  had  sent  to 
that  monarch.  There  were  other  like  honours 
showered  upon  him  in  the  bombastic  manner 
of  the  period  —  so  many  that  it  would  be  tire- 
some to  name  them  all.  I  will  mention  only 
one  more  which  was  less  formal,  but  which 
must  have  meant  much  to  the  old  man,  who, 
when  he  was  confined  to  his  bed  a  year  before 


his  death,  was  visited  by  the  Gomte  St.ValHer. 
With  characteristic  grace  and  simplicity  the 
Frenchman  approached  his  bedside  and  said: 
"  M.  Bodoni,  I  come  to  render  homage  to  the 
genius  of  typography.  You  are  very  well  known 
in  France.  The  Emperor  esteems  and  likes 
you,  and  it  is  he  who  has  ordered  me  to  make 
this  visit.  Another  day  I  will  make  my  own. " 
Bodoni  showed  such  appreciation  of  this  and 
expressed  himself  in  such  a  lively  manner  that 
the  Count  further  remarked:  "M.  Bodoni,  if 
you  have  so  much  fire  being  sick,  \\'hat  will 
you  be  when  you  are  well  again?" 

Bodoni  never  really  got  well  again,  but 
struggled  to  his  feet  only  long  enough  to 
do  some  work  on  the  "Manuale,"  without 
hope,  however,  of  being  able  to  publish  it 
himself.  He  died  toward  the  end  of  Novem- 
ber, i8i3. 

Of  Bodoni  s  personality,  as  I  said  at  the 
outset,  one  does  not  gather  an  entirely  satis- 
factory image  from  the  biography  by  De  Lama. 
Nevertheless,  it  is  possible  to  dislodge  from 
that  monumental  pile  of  human  and  super- 
human virtues  enough  minor  circumstances 


with  which,  aided  by  the  accounts  of  some  of 
his  distinguished  visitors  and  critics  and  the 
few  excellent  portraits  which  exist,  to  construct 
a  figure  of  attractive  proportions.  The  over- 
flowing vigour,  of  which  his  labours  them- 
selves are  sufficient  evidence,  was  tempered 
by  North-Italian  firmness  of  character.  Of  a 
lively  temper  and  a  sprightly  good  humour 
as  well,  he  nevertheless  had  the  perseverance 
and  the  steadfastness  of  purpose  that  generally 
are  associated  with  characters  of  more  sober 
mien.  He  appears  to  have  been  generous, 
and  vain  in  the  highest  degree,  but  with  the 
simple ,  unconscious ,  and  whole-hearted  vanity 
of  the  Latin  temperament.  He  bathed  freely 
and  joyously  in  the  honours  which  were  show- 
ered upon  him,  and  no  doubt  toadied  not  a 
little  to  the  favour  of  the  great  persons  from 
whom  these  distinctions  flowed ,  but  one  should 
bear  in  mind  that  it  would  have  been  next  to 
impossible,  at  that  time,  to  have  developed 
and  maintained  such  an  enterprise  on  any 
other  terms. 

In    1818   his  widow   published   the   final 
edition   of  the   "Manuale"   which   contains 


45 


specimens  of  all  of  his  types  and  ornaments, 
but  as  you  will  have  an  opportunity  to  see 
this  and  examine  it  for  yourselves  I  shall  not 
tax  you  with  a  further  description  of  it. 

In  1872  a  statue  of  Bodoni  was  erected  at 
Saluzzo,  and  on  this  occasion  an  exhibition 
was  held  by  the  United  Typographical  Societies 
of  Italy  to  which  American  printers  were  in- 
vited to  contribute.  This  year  the  anniversary 
of  his  death  is  to  be  celebrated  by  the  different 
printing  organizations  of  Italy. 

We  have  seen  with  what  esteem  he  was 
held  in  his  own  day,  how  much  he  was  ad- 
mired, and  how  greatly  his  works  were  prized, 
and  the  influence  he  had  upon  the  other 
printers  of  the  period,  some  of  whom,  the 
Didots,  Firman,  and  Pierre,  I  am  inclined 
to  think,  surpassed  him  in  many  respects  in 
his  own  manner. 

It  only  remains  to  consider  the  position  he 
occupies  in  the  History  of  the  Art  of  Typog- 
raphy from  the  viewpoint  of  our  own  day. 
In  a  paper  read  at  the  Sorboiiiio  in  1900, 
Piero  Barbera  said  of  him  that  though  ho  had 
a  great  idea  of  the  perfection  of  printing  from 


the  artistic  point  of  view,  and  had  high  esteem 
for  the  dignity  of  the  art,  he  lacked  perhaps 
that  of  the  influence  it  must  have  upon  society 
— he  had  not  the  clear  vision  of  its  ultimate 
evolution.  He  was  a  kind  of  court  officer, 
like  a  "first  gentleman  of  the  bedchamber," 
or  any  other.  His  was,  in  short,  a  wholly 
aristocratic  art.  Mr.  Alfred  Pollard,  in  his 
work  entitled  "Fine  Books,"  which  is  one 
of  the  more  important  recent  publications 
upon  the  history  of  printing,  dismisses  Bodoni 
with  scant  courtesy  as  a  mere  follower  of 
Baskerville  and  a  printer  of  books  very  good 
in  their  way,  but  in  quite  a  wrong  way.  But 
Mr.  Pollard's  work,  scholarly  and  replete  as 
it  is  with  an  intimate  knowledge  of  his  subject, 
is  written  in  what  might  be  called  the  British 
perspective  method  of  criticism.  That  is  to 
say,  the  critic  stands  in  the  middle  of  England 
and  views  his  subjects  in  diminishing  per- 
spective in  all  directions,  his  estimation  de- 
creasing as  the  geographical  location  of  the 
object  viewed  recedes  from  the  British  Isles. 
Baskerville  is  in  the  immediate  foreground, — 
he  is  on  the  Island , — life  size ,  and  Bodoni  over 


in  Parma,  off  on  the  horizon,  is  scarcely  visible 
to  the  naked  Enghsh  eye. 

And  then  by  the  critic  so  disposed,  it  may 
very  well  be  argued  that  Bodoni  represents 
an  epoch  of  affectations  and  a  school  founded 
upon  false  conceptions.  But  if  we  grant  all 
this,  may  we  not  be  tempted  as  well  to  inquire 
with  the  same  rigour  into  the  quality  and  value 
of  the  inspiration  by  which  recent  English ,  and 
to  a  great  extent  American,  "revivals"  of  the 
art  of  printing  have  been  set  on  foot?  To  the 
powerful  personality  and  uncompromising 
craftsmanship  of  WiUiam  Morris  we  certainly 
owe  much  of  the  interest  of  our  own  particular 
day  in  printing  as  a  fine  art,  and  his  teachings, 
more  than  any  others,  have  dominated  most 
of  the  attempts  at  fine  bookmaking  in  England 
for  some  years  past.  His  masterful  revivals 
of  fifteenth-century  printing  are  certainly 
beautiful  objects  of  art  in  themselves,  and  if 
they  possess  any  fault,  it  is  only  that  they  are 
nearly,  if  not  quite,  impossible  to  read.  They 
were  printed  in  characters  modeled  after  those 
of  an  age  in  which  he  did  not  live  —  they 
attempted,    through    an    inspiration    largely 


founded  upon  sentiment,  to  bring  back  a 
manner  irrevocably  gone  by.  Was  this  an 
affectation  better  or  worse,  or  only  as  bad  as 
that  under  which  Bodoni  laboured? 

The  interest  which  Morris  aroused  has  cer- 
tainly done  much  good,  but  one  cannot  help 
feeling  that  the  style  he  created  has  rather 
hindered  than  helped  the  present-day  printer 
in  the  advancement  of  his  art.  It  has  given 
rise  to  a  curious  notion  that  any  art  in  printing 
has  inevitably  something  to  do  with  the  style 
of  the  fifteenth  century  and  is  hence  not 
appropriate  for  the  demands  of  every-day 
work,  but  should  be  exercised  only  on  ex- 
pensive and  rare  occasions.  In  consequence, 
we  find  printing  generally  conceived  as  of 
two  distinct  kinds  —  "commercial"  and 
' '  artistic."  In  reality  the  two  kinds  of  print- 
ing which  exist  and  always  have  existed  are 
good  printing  and  bad  printing ,  and  any  piece 
of  work,  no  matter  what  its  purpose,  if  it  be 
well  and  appropriately  done,  is  artistic,  if  it 
be  paid  for,  is  commercial. 

Bodoni,  whose  name  is  anathema  to  the 
more  ardent  followers  of  the  Morris  school, 


made  improvements  and  infused  new  life 
into  what  was  current  in  his  day.  What 
mannerisms  he  had  were  of  his  own  time 
and  did  not  interfere  with  the  utiHty  of  his 
work  —  he  made  printing  more  readable  and 
not  less  so. 


•^-^"i;^- 


173  78  1 


